[SOLVED] Weird pacman behaviour [SOLVED]

medicineman25 · 2016-12-06 06:44:18

TL;DR: system crashed on update, shit got real. Pacman seems to have made a duplicate system, so to speak; it didn't get rid of the old system during update coz of black out. Remove siglevel in pacman.conf, do a full system upgrade. Lxdm wasn't launching so I --force installed it and then proceeded to --force install packages, that related to a list of .so files that were outputting as empty (pacman outputs the list after installing lxdm). After that things worked. Then obviously pacman-key --init and --populate archlinux when you get things working properly.

So my system crashed yesterday during an update.

I tried to launch lxdm and it just went black screen.

So I tried to run a full system update and nothing went through.

I got pgp errors, so I changed the siglevel to 'Never'

Then I was getting conflict errors so I deleted the packages as prompted by pacman. (it was most of my .pkg files)

Then things went through but I still get this error:

ldconfig: File /usr/lib/libboost_*.so is empty, not checked

I have used the wildcard to represent the 100's of files that are listed in this error message.

I checked all the packages with pacman -Qo and NONE of them apparently belong to any package. So I deleted some of them and attempted to update lxdm. System update works but lxdm won't update properly.

So I did a little more digging and found this:

pacman crashes during an upgrade
In the case that pacman crashes with a "database write" error while removing packages, and reinstalling or upgrading packages fails thereafter, do the following:
Boot using the Arch installation media. Preferably use a recent media so that the pacman version matches/is newer than the system.
Mount the system's root filesystem, e.g. mount /dev/sdaX /mnt as root, and check the mount has sufficient space with df -h
If the system uses default database and directory locations, you can now update the system's pacman database and upgrade it via pacman --root=/mnt --cachedir=/mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg -Syyu as root.
After the upgrade, one way to double-check for not upgraded but still broken packages: find /mnt/usr/lib -size 0
Followed by a re-install of any still broken package via pacman --root /mnt --cachedir=/mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg -S package.

So I did that but get this error message:

error: failed to initialize alpm library (could not find or read directory)

So any ideas as to what I can do from here would be great. Completely at a loss.

Thanks
Medicineman25

Last edited by medicineman25 (2016-12-06 09:37:09)

seth · 2016-12-06 07:55:18

You did *what* in particular, and get that error in return of what *exact* call.
(Notice that the most likely reason for the call failing is that you already failed to mount the systems root partition and/or lack follow up mounts on a more complex partitioning)

The files btw. belong belong to the boost-libs package, you may try to force install it as dependency ("man 8 pacman"), but there might be more broken things so whether chrooted or not, you better follow the instructions.

medicineman25 · 2016-12-06 08:41:35

You did *what* in particular, and get that error in return of what *exact* call.

Sorry, which part are you talking about?

Then I was getting conflict errors so I deleted the packages as prompted by pacman. (it was most of my .pkg files)

When I tried to run an update i.e. -Syyu, it was installing just fine and then spat out an error about a .pkg file being out of date. Then it prompted me to delete it. So I type 'Y' as prompted. This went on for several packages, in fact most of the packages that I had previously installed myself. i.e. Simplicitystudio, netbeans, dhcpcd etc...

So I did that but get this error message:

I booted in with installation media, as per the instructions on pacman page if it crashes during update, mounted the root partition (and then unmounted root and mounted all my partitions because it didn't like it just as root) and ran the command:

pacman --root=/mnt --cachedir=/mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg -Syyu

And it goes through just fine. Then I check the empty files with:

find /mnt/usr/lib -size 0

That returns a whole heap of files. Python2.7, pkgconfig, libreoffice, libboost, glibmm, babl and libbabl... and a few other random packages.

So, I start with libreoffice and everything seems to install just fine until I 1000's of conflict errors like:

libreoffice-fresh: /mnt/usr/share/mimeInk/applcation/libreoffice ........ .desktop exists in filesystem

The same goes for linux-api-headers, tzdata, glibc, ncurses, readling, bash, attr, acl, gmp, libcap, gdbm, db, perl, openssl, coreutils, findutils, libtasn1, libffi, p11-kit, ca-certificate-utils, ca-certificate-mozilla, ca-certificate-cacert, libutil-linux, e2fsprogs, libsasl, libldap, keyutils, krb5, libssh2, zlib, curl, hunspell, expat, bzip2, python, icu, librevenge, libwpd.... even saying that /usr/bin exists.. which is really weird..

(Notice that the most likely reason for the call failing is that you already failed to mount the systems root partition and/or lack follow up mounts on a more complex partitioning)

Nope, I mounted all my partitions correctly, also repeatedly just in case that was the problem.

Last edited by medicineman25 (2016-12-06 08:47:49)

seth · 2016-12-06 08:58:49

Well, you get the "exists in filesystem" errors because the (broken) files are there (from the failed upgrade which apparently left behind a junked pacman database), so what you do is to either remove the conflicting files! (not! directories) or --force the update (but first read the risks implied by "force", do not apply it blindly!)

And when did you get the "error: failed to initialize alpm library"...?

medicineman25 · 2016-12-06 09:09:17

Well, you get the "exists in filesystem" errors because the (broken) files are there (from the failed upgrade which apparently left behind a junked pacman database), so what you do is to either remove the conflicting files! (not! directories) or --force the update (but first read the risks implied by "force", do not apply it blindly!)

Yes I figured as much... ok so I've booted back into my system as user and I'm getting a much shorter list of empty files now...

I'm going to try and re-install these packages as per the empty list and see what happens.

I'll report back in halfa

Thanks!

medicineman25 · 2016-12-06 09:25:37

Ok so it's all fixed.

I did as you suggested and reinstalled the packages that were related to the files displayed as empty, after trying to re-install lxdm. Silly really, I should have just done that in the first place.

they were packages like atk, glibmm, augeas etc...

After having briefly read what these packages do I'm not surprised that lxdm froze.

Thanks for your patience!!

Arch Linux

#1 2016-12-06 06:44:18

[SOLVED] Weird pacman behaviour [SOLVED]

#2 2016-12-06 07:55:18

Re: [SOLVED] Weird pacman behaviour [SOLVED]

#3 2016-12-06 08:41:35

Re: [SOLVED] Weird pacman behaviour [SOLVED]

#4 2016-12-06 08:58:49

Re: [SOLVED] Weird pacman behaviour [SOLVED]

#5 2016-12-06 09:09:17

Re: [SOLVED] Weird pacman behaviour [SOLVED]

#6 2016-12-06 09:25:37

Re: [SOLVED] Weird pacman behaviour [SOLVED]

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